Freak City (14 page)

“Ah.” I was still staring at the ceiling.

“Hello!” An older man stuck his head through the doorway. He had an impressive, full, gray beard and a sturdy build.

“Hi, Dad. We have a visitor!”

The man nodded at me. “A colleague from the bank?” His gaze wandered over my jeans and then stopped at my dirt-encrusted tennis shoes.

“A friend of Leah’s,” Cindy explained the situation. She emphasized the words strangely like her father had a drastically impaired mental capacity.

The mother finally returned from the garden. “Darling, you’re home already! Then we can go ahead and eat. The little one will be back any minute.”

Everyone called Leah the little one here. I thought it was sweet. She seemed to be the baby of the family.

“Where did you meet our daughter, anyway?” Leah’s mom asked. There was still a touch of distrust in her voice. When it came to Leah, she was apparently a bit of a worrywart.

“In a café, if you can imagine,” Cindy answered for me. “Who would have thought it?” Leah’s mom and sister looked at me as if they wanted to say something else but nothing came. Instead, the mom took silverware from a drawer.

“Do you know sign language?” Cindy finally asked. I had been afraid of that question. They would surely be laughing themselves blue in the face at my expense in a few minutes. When Leah finally arrived and I was sitting at the table like a mute fish. With the few bits I had learned, there was no way to avoid embarrassing myself miserably.

“I’m taking an intensive course right now at the university,” I mumbled. “Every afternoon.”

“Well look at that,” the mother said. She began to set the table. “You can learn it at the university. I had no idea. I thought it was only taught at the adult education center.”

The father wedged himself into the corner seat. His oldest daughter sat down next to him.

There was another key in the door. I put on a forced smile. We had gotten along great at the pool, Leah and I. She wanted to see me again, she had said so herself. But Tommek and Sabine had been right with their misgivings. When Leah stepped into the kitchen, all the color drained from her face. She looked at me like I was an apparition. Not like an angel or religious vision, but as if she was suddenly having a horror trip.

“Sorry,” I formed with my hands. “I wanted to see you again! You didn’t get in touch again after we met.”

“Because Franzi had problems!” she explained very slowly in sign language. Every fiber in her body made it clear that she was angry about my presence here. Outraged, she continued to talk to me. “Where did you get my address?” she asked.

“From Tommek,” I replied haltingly with my hands and handed her the movie. That didn’t seem to calm her down any. “Everyone knows I don’t want people to visit me at home!” she said, and her signs seemed to become harder with every second. I didn’t understand every word, but cobbled together the meaning with difficulty from the signs I did recognize. She got faster and faster. In the next sentence, I lost the thread completely. I had no idea what she was talking about. She signed too wildly and without a single pause. I couldn’t follow her at all. Helplessly, I looked to her mother.

She shrugged her shoulders apologetically. Cindy giggled. “I don’t have any idea what she’s saying. But she doesn’t seem to be too happy about you being here.”

I turned away from Leah and stared at Cindy. Something she had just said tore me away from the ugly scene with Leah, who was still chewing me out as if I had done something terrible to her.

“You don’t know sign language?” I looked at Leah’s sister in bewilderment.

Leah stamped her foot. My gaze glided back to her. She formed the term “sign language.” “Speak in sign language!” she ordered me with her hands and glared at me resentfully.

Confused, I looked toward her mother. “I’m sorry.” She smiled softly. “None of us uses sign language. I thought Leah had told you.”

Leah stamped her foot again. She didn’t know what the conversation was about. Maybe she thought we were talking about her.

“Should we go out in the garden?” I gave Leah a pleading look. I wanted to be alone with her for a minute, outside, and clear up the situation.

Leah’s green eyes shut down. She stared at me like we were strangers. “How can you think of playing games now?” her hands reproached me. “Is that what you think? That my entire life is a funny game?”

We were obviously talking past each other. I didn’t understand what she wanted to say to me. I had translated something wrong. Garden . . . garden . . .

I broke out in a sweat. The whole situation suddenly seemed surreal and grotesque. I stood here with a girl who couldn’t even communicate with her own family. Who couldn’t communicate with me. Who was hostile toward me because I had suggested we retreat outside into the garden.

Then I got it. Instead of the sign for garden, I had used the sign for game. No, Leah’s life was surely not a funny game. But it was too complicated to clear up the misunderstanding.

Dazed, I sat down. I didn’t care that Leah was still talking like a waterfall with her hands. I didn’t care that her parents and her sister were eyeing me as if I were an especially hopeless case. I just sat there and prayed that someone would put a dish of ratatouille in front of me.

Leah’s father stood up with a jerk. “Now calm down,” he growled at his deaf daughter. “The young man didn’t mean any harm. This is unbearable!”

Leah didn’t react at all. She hadn’t even known that he was talking; she had only seen his angry look. Because of his beard, she couldn’t see that his lips were moving.

Her dad stepped up next to his wife and nervously ladled ratatouille into the bowls. “So let’s all eat now. She’ll calm down then.” He nodded at me apologetically. “She is our little one, our baby. In the past, we’ve always let her get away with everything. Sometimes she just doesn’t know how to behave.”

The mom and older sister exchanged knowing looks. “Leah is famous for her tantrums,” Cindy said. “Once, the chef in a restaurant even kicked her out!”

The mom nodded. “But that was a misunderstanding. That’s all.”

Leah’s eyes raced back and forth between the faces of everyone at the table. Her eyes clamped down on the mouths flapping open and closed for a few seconds, only to land on the next person’s face the next moment. She looked like she might break out into tears any minute. She had stopped berating me with wild gesticulations and simply ignored me. All the energy seemed to have drained from her. She sat down next to me but avoided making even the slightest eye contact.

“So, tell us something about you!” Leah’s mom said in a friendly tone as she started to eat. “Where are you from?”

Next to me, Leah shoveled the food into her mouth. Her eyes were fixated on the violet blue tablecloth.

I answered glumly.

“Needs salt!” Cindy said, jumping up from her seat. Leah’s mother knocked on the table. Leah looked up.

Her mother moved her fingers as if she were sprinkling salt on something. “Salt?” she asked. “Do you want some salt? Salt, sweetie pie?”

Leah nodded silently.

“We understand each other just fine,” Leah’s mother said in my direction. “It works even without sign language. She can read a lot from our lips, especially with me. The doctors urged us to do that back when she was little. It doesn’t help when the deaf isolate themselves and only live in their own world. In the long run, they have to make their way in a hearing world!”

I looked up and my eyes got tangled in Leah’s dad’s beard.

“The funniest thing happened today at the bank!” Cindy blurted out. “I told you about that intern we only took on because he’s the nephew of our most important client?”

Everyone hung on Cindy’s every word. She told a funny story about her work. The intern had managed to drop the key to one of the vaults down the toilet. When she was done, her parents laughed heartily.

“People do the strangest things!” her mom said.

“You can say that again,” her dad chimed in.

Leah was still staring at the tablecloth.

The meal was over and I stood up. “Are you going already?” Leah’s mom looked at me a little sadly. “Don’t you two want to work things out?”

I looked down at Leah. She sat there staring at the tablecloth and didn’t move. I didn’t even recognize her anymore.

“Another time,” I replied. In parting, I gently touched her shoulder, then left. The lunch had been an unmitigated disaster.

Outside, I reached for my cell phone. “I’m sorry!” I typed in. Probably three or four times.

Five minutes later, I got Leah’s reply. “Now do you under-stand why I didn’t want you to come to my house???”

I understood. I understood everything.

Later, she wrote me again. “Ever heard of the Lazarus syndrome?”

I replied that I hadn’t.

“That’s when people are declared dead by the doctors. And then, they suddenly come back to life. It’s happened more than twenty times so far in the whole world.”

My mother lay in her new Ikea lounge chair in the yard and was deeply engrossed in her wildly colorful magazine. “Prince Frederick of Denmark lost his wedding ring while he was scuba diving.” She looked up at me. “Dumb, isn’t it?”

I thought of the vault key dropped in the toilet. Of Leah, who would never know about that story. For whom that story was nothing but a bunch of mouths flapping open and shut.

Mom smiled. The sun played on her face, and in her T-shirt and shorts, for just a minute, she looked like a young girl.

“Yeah, that’s dumb.”

Late summer wasn’t the best time for a catering service. Apart from a few outdoor parties, there was nothing going on. The weddings, business events, and anniversaries were more likely to be in the spring and fall. Now, in August, almost everyone was on vacation. My mom didn’t have much to do and spent most of her time hanging around in the yard or with her friends. And Sandra still hadn’t called.

“Where’s Dad?”

“Climbing with Tanya. Can you imagine, he wants to redo the kitchen. With everything in it. Even a refrigerator with an ice machine.”

I looked up toward the sun. It was hot, too hot for my taste. “Why? A new kitchen. I mean . . .”

“We’ve had the old one for almost thirteen years. I finally want a modern stove. And enough space for all my bowls. We have an appointment with a kitchen studio next week.”

I was still looking at the sun. Crazy. In 5 billion years, it would turn into a red giant and just swallow up the earth. But by then we’d all be gone. Our little townhouse, the Ikea chair, and the new kitchen.

“Didn’t you two always want to go to Finland?”

My mother pushed her sunglasses up into her hair. “What made you think of that out of the blue?”

“You could use the money for a trip. Next summer. Spend a few weeks in Finland. Iris will be older then and I can take care of her.”

My mother furrowed her brow. “You have some strange ideas.”

No one said anything. It was too hot to keep talking about Finland.

“There was a letter for you in the mail today. Sent from Munich.” She looked at me with curiosity. “From Sandra, maybe? Looks like a girl’s handwriting. Are you two still not speaking to each other?”

I sighed. Thanks to her best friend, my mom once again knew everything. Just two days ago, she had made prints of a bunch of photos of Sandra and me, supposedly because she hadn’t gotten around to it before. The pictures were lying on the table, as if by sheer coincidence.

“She’s only gotten in touch once since Iris’s birthday. But she has a lot to do, too, with the new band and everything.” My mother nodded and looked at me, watching me. It was as if she wanted to search for more answers in my face.

“Where is it?”

“What?”

“The letter, Mom.” I blinked. The sun made my face tingle.

“On your bed.”

Fabulous. Was there
anyone
who didn’t go into my room whenever they felt like it? I should finally get around to getting a lock for my door. My dad didn’t like the idea. He didn’t want a family that blocked each other out, as he described it. Apparently, he had never been fifteen and had never needed his own space.

“What’s up with Claudio, anyway? Are you two not getting along?” Again, my mom had put on her scanner look.

“He’s on vacation,” I mumbled. That wasn’t even a lie. Claudio had decided at the last minute to go to Spain with his mother. He had only sent me a text after the fact.

I left my mother alone in the yard with her glossy magazines and went to my room. On the neatly made bed lay the letter. It was a simple gray envelope, but I recognized the handwriting immediately. Not Sandra, but Leah had written to me. Who had given her my address? Probably Sabine. Or Leah had figured it out herself online.

My eyes flew over the lines. The letter was quite long. No one had ever written me such a serious letter before. When I had finished, I lay down on my bed and started over from the beginning. My heart was pounding suspiciously fast, even though Leah had only written about harmless things.

Dear Mika,

I want to start this letter with an apology. I’m sorry I flipped out at you like that at my house. Your unannounced visit took me completely by surprise, because I never dreamed you would do that. I usually don’t like it when people see me with my family. I love them all a lot, but a lot of the time, I feel excluded and not taken seriously. As if I were an exchange student from some exotic country, and nobody speaks her language and they have to constantly be reminded how much effort it takes for everyone to include her anyway. I don’t want you to experience me so weak. You should have a powerful impression of me!

She also wrote that she missed me, and that she was impressed by how much progress I was making with sign language. I thought she was exaggerating but was happy about the compliment. I read the sentence
I am proud of you
several times in a row.

At the end of the letter, she wrote:
I definitely want to see you again! I didn’t get in touch after we spent the afternoon at the pool because so much happened. One of my mom’s uncles died, and we were out of town for a few days. Then Franzi had enormous boy troubles and I had to be there for her. But just imagine, everything turned out great for her!